From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 20:19:43 MDT
--- Emlyn O'regan <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au>
wrote:
> Adrian Tymes wrote:
> > Also, consider that most criminals give no thought
> to
> > what happens if they're caught. In the same
> defiance
> > of rational thought that leads them to believe
> crime
> > pays in the long run, they usually simply believe
> they
> > won't be caught. (There are exceptions, of
> course,
> > and for some criminals - usually the ones who
> think
> > clearly enough about this that they do not, in
> fact,
> > get caught - crime does pay. But that's a small
> > fraction of the cases, since most people who think
> > that clearly tend to find far more profitable uses
> for
> > their time.)
>
> Are you sure that's a small fraction of the cases?
> People always say that
> criminals are dumb, but I think the sample might be
> skewed by only being
> able to measure those who are caught. So much
> property is stolen, for
> instance, and never returned, so that it seems to me
> that most theft is
> actually completely successful.
The only reliable source of the numbers is law
enforcement officials themselves - and one could
easily suspect that data of being forged, deliberately
or not, towards lower-IQ criminals.
That said, there is a theoretical reason why criminals
are, on the average, not that bright. In most
societies, the majority of laws are made for the
benefit of the governed, and more importantly
represent behavior that certain people find
objectionable. People can and do increase their own
wealth (or whatever they find valuable, such as
spiritual enlightenment, but even that requires at
least some resources to keep body and soul together)
by a wide variety of means, but some methods are more
likely to get said wealth taken away afterwards than
others. It is little coincidence that the greatest
sources of wealth happen to be those that bring at
least small measures of wealth to just about everyone
else. For instance, no matter what one may think of
CEOs of large corporations, the fact remains that said
corporations are providing something of value to
people, else they would have no customers and would
not be large. (Which is not to say that some of said
figures do not also turn to criminal activities to
boost their revenues. But the ones that do are
newsworthy because they are exceptions: less than 10%
of all corporate executives in the US were indicted on
insider trading or the like so far this year, probably
far less. Source for that: NYSE lists 3008
US-headquartered corporations at this time. There is
at least one CxO per company - probably far more, but
we can prove without research that there is at least
one. Further, there are several corporations not on
the NYSE; NASDAQ has at least 100. But the SEC has
only launched 309 administrative actions so far this
year. 309 < (3008 + 100) * .1)
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